So, here’s a little dilemma for me personally which is events. I know Caroline, and I think some others mentioned how often we miss community members talks or presentations nearby, or events that community members know of that are relevant to others. But in our hectic everyday lives we miss letting others know about them. Because there is no easy way for this at the moment.
At any given time there are many events that take place. Several of which are relevant to either the community taken as a whole, or some projects or groups. It’s also nice to know when community members are participating in events, especially if they are doing talks so we can e.g. help spread the word about them via our twitter & FB channels. Is there an easy way to feed these 5 example calendars/feeds into edgeryders.eu?
The Internet’s standard way of sharing calendars is the iCalendar (.ics) format. Of the sites you mention
socialinnoation.se uses Google Calendar, so after adding these calendars to ones own Google Calendar (bottom right button) one can download them as .ics files: multiple events per calendar, but one cannot directly download all events in one [source].
lanyrd.com and europa.eu offer the .ics files for download, but only for individual events, not a full download. These could be harvested with a .ics specialized web spider, but I don't know any service for it. We could create a simple script for it, but these screenscraper scripts tend to break easily. So probably better one would manually gather the .ics links and feed them to our site.
rpfrance.eu has only a PDF file, seemingly no .ics files at all. Only manual conversion is possible if one does not want to try the ridiculous task of scripting something that harvests events from their PDF ...
The last part would be an interface on edgeryders.eu that accepts uploads of .ics files, and links to them, and aggregates them all into one calendar that would be managed by Commons Events (a module we already have installed). Or some other module.
So as you see, only one of the four calendars could be integrated as a feed, the others need regular manual action (except somebody has time for that kind of super-specialized software that automates it …). Which probably makes implementing this not really meaningful. Except there’s somebody who already integrates all these events manually in their own Google Calendar, which we can then feed in here.
